A Little Bit of All Right

I thought this was my June bake with the Cake Slice Bakers, but I was not paying enough attention to detail and baked the WRONG Pistachio Raspberry cake.  You've got to love a cookbook that has two completely different recipes for pistachio raspberry cakes. The cake I baked starts with pistachio sponge cake layers.  You then make a pistachio buttercream and use that and macerated, sugar-soaked raspberries in between the layers. The pistachio sponge cake was lovely.  It rose beautifully and had a nice light taste.  It mixed perfectly with the raspberries.  The buttercream was a little bland and heavy and didn't quite fit in with the rest of the cake.  Perhaps I've become a bit spoiled by the smoothness of the cooked buttercreams I've used the last few times.  I may need to see how to incorporate nuts into a Swiss or French buttercream and try this again.

In addition to the Lavender Lemon Blackberry Cake, I also baked the chocolate selection for my Daughter's birthday party.  The Kladdkaka-Sticky Chocolate Cake bakes up like a big brownie. It was pretty perfect just as it was, but we served it up with vanilla ice cream and blackberries for the birthday party.

May's cake choices all sounded lovely, but there was one that was looked exactly like what my daughter would want for her birthday party - the Lemon Lavender Blackberry Cake.  Normally she's a chocolate girl, but the idea of that light purple cake gracing her party overrode any dreams of chocolate frosting. And then to seal my nomination for mom of the year, we found a kit at the party store that allowed us to turn any layer cake into an unicorn. The cake recipe was pretty straight-forward, and produced a moist cake with a light lemon taste.  The instructions said to place whole blackberries into each pan of batter before you bake, so that's what I did.  It made for a pretty cut, but we couldn't really taste much blackberry flavor. And even though I felt like I followed the directions for placing the blackberries, there were still pieces without very many.  I used an entire container, but it seems like more would have been better in this case. The ...

This month I needed a cake that was both fast and had ingredients that I already had on hand.  Fortunately, one of our choices met both requirements.  The Marbled Chocolate Orange Bundt Cake uses and orange flavored cake batter, divided into two parts.  Melted white chocolate mixed into one half and melted semi-sweet chocolate mixed into the other half.  You then swirl the two batters together, bake, and top with an orange-flavored icing.  The original recipe did call for orange oil which I did not have, so I substituted 1 teaspoon orange extract for the 1/4 teaspoon orange oil. The cake was okay.  The batters didn't stay swirled the way I had hoped they would, and the chocolate taste was very muted.  But the cake was moist. Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through. This year it is The European Cake Cookbook by Tatyana Nesteruk. We each choose one cake to bake, and the...

This month I needed something that was a little less time-consuming than the last few cakes I've made, so I chose to bake the Austrian Pound Cake.  It's a moist cake with bits of dried fruit mixed in, baked in a Bundt pan.  The original recipe calls for golden raisins and dried apricots.  My kids are not fans of raisins, and for some reason my store was out of dried apricots, so I substituted dried cherries. The cake itself was quite tasty and moist.  I think it would make a great foundation for just about any dried fruit or other addition.   I did have a bit of problem with the fruit all sinking to the bottom.  The recipe calls for soaking the fruit in orange liqueur and then mixing into the cake batter without any additional steps.  I imagine if I had then coated in flour, I might have had better results.  It's also possible that the actual fruit called for would have "floated" a little better. Either way, it's de...

For my February bake with the Cake Slice Bakers, I chose to bake something for a small Super Bowl Party we were having at our house.  The Banoffee Cake from The European Cake Cookbook  seemed like a great choice as one of our guests hails from England.  The original Banoffee Pie is claimed to have been invented in England in 1971.  The name comes from the combination of Banana and Toffee - two of the three key ingredients in the pie, the other being whipped cream. The cake base is a simple cake with finely chopped pecans added. Cut the cake layers in half to get four layers all together and then top each layer with toffee, sliced bananas, whipped cream, and a sprinkling of cocoa power. The toffee in my cake is actually a can of Nestle's Dulce de Leche.  I was a little suspicious, but the stuff was amazing! The cake was a huge hit. Even my banana-hating son gobbled it up.  We had some left that went into the refrigerator where it was completely e...

New year, new book!  The Cake Slice Bakers are baking from The European Cake Cookbook  by Tatyana Nesteruk.  For January, I chose to bake the Chocolate St. Honore Cake.  This cake starts with puff pastry onto which a three concentric circles of pate a choux is piped and then the entire thing baked.  You create two of these, fill with chocolate pastry cream and flavored whipped cream, layer them and top with chocolate filled and dipped profiteroles. I knew when I saw this as a choice for January that I would need to at least attempt.  I didn't great confidence in my ability to complete it because I have never managed to create pate a choux that baked up correctly. I spent a couple of week watching videos and reading articles until I had a good sense for what I had done in the past.  For this cake, I started with the author's pate a choux recipe, but I used bread flour instead of all-purpose flour, and I beat the eggs slightly so that I could add part ...